To be held in beautiful, private homes in Woodstock. Continental breakfast and gourmet lunch included. Limited to 12-15 participants per class.
All sales are final. Registrations are transferable, but only refundable at 75% until April 5.

ALL WORKSHOPS ARE SOLD OUT!

SOLD OUT!

In this workshop I will ask writers to attempt a true hybrid: a block-buster novel with literary merit. Through a series of prompts and exercises, the workshop will encourage participants to combine the best fictional techniques of the masters (from Charles Dickens to Toni Morrison) with the narrative strategies common to best-sellers (from Gone with the Wind to Jaws). Writers will be prompted to apply James Joyce's famous internal dialogue/initial style and/or the Uncle Charles Principal to a Western or legal thriller. Or T.S. Eliot's spatial form as structure to the plot of a slasher novel. Several best-selling mystery writers, many of whom are university creative writing professors, are already employing techniques from the canon of great writers. Want to write a bodice ripper that can compete for a Booker Prize? This workshop is for anyone who wants to aim for a literary masterpiece while giving his or her novel a chance for commercial success.

Susan Sutliff Brown, PhD has taught creative writing at State College of Florida and Eckerd College until her recent retirement after thirty years. A well-published James Joyce scholar and lover of recreational fiction (especially legal thrillers), Susan Brown brings a knowledge of both the literary crust and the heavily commercial to her current work as a book doctor, personal writing coach, and ghostwriter. As you can see on her website, she has played a role in bringing over a dozen books to press. Susan S. Brown

SOLD OUT!

Imagine a rose climbing haphazardly on its lattice. Imagine a racquetball bouncing randomly in the perfect cube of its court.

In poetry, the lattice of form allows us to grow our wild expressions with security. The walls of form allow us to bounce our ideas, no matter how intense, within their support.

In this workshop, we will explore the symbiosis of form and content. We will come to see what thousands of years of poets from Japan to Persia to Italy to the Mississippi delta have seen--that through restriction comes unimaginable freedom.

We will write and discuss such forms as the sonnet, the senryu, the ghazal, and the villanelle, examining some of the finest examples of each.

Gretchen Primack teaches writing and poetry and designs writing curriculum for Bard College's Bard Prison Initiative. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, Best New Poets, Columbia Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Tampa Review, Open City, and many other literary journals, and she has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. Her chapbook, The Slow Creaking of Planets, came out in 2007 with Finishing Line Press.

SOLD OUT!

From the Moth to This American Life to the Happy Endings Reading series, true storytelling is hot right now. For the past three years, the TMI Project has been producing "Too Much Information," evenings of true, staged monologues that result from a 12-week writing and performing workshop in Rosendale. For this edition of the Woodstock Writer's Festival, the TMI Project's Eva Tenuto, Julie Novak and Sari Botton bring an abbreviated version of that workshop. It will include a brief performance by the instructors, followed by improv and writing exercises, sharing and feedback geared toward taking participants' writings from the page to the stage.

We at the TMI Project (Eva Tenuto, Julie Novak and Sari Botton) are devoted to helping people identify and share the stories they need to tell for personal growth and healing - stories which will also provide eye-opening, healing resonance for audience members, while entertaining them.

We focus on the parts of personal stories that people usually leave out - the painful or embarrassing parts - and which listeners will most want to hear. When we share the secret truths burning in our souls, we unburden ourselves while paving the way for greater understanding and tolerance, at both the individual and community levels. Please join us in this. TMI Project

SOLD OUT!

Learn the ropes of producing and marketing your own eBook. The first half of the workshop will teach you all of the technical specs for converting your manuscript to a viable, navigable eBook, including cover creation, navigation, table of contents, text flow, and pagination for both the Kindle and Nook-type eReaders. The second half of the program will teach you how to market and sell your eBook, including ISBN registration, keywords and tags, use of social media including Facebook, Twitter, Google and GoodReads (and targeting marketing options in each), and offer a panoply of tricks and tips to use target marketing to reach interested readers. Attendees will produce an actual eBook at the workshop and are encouraged to bring their own short manuscripts.

Rick Tannenbaum is the publisher at Hen House Press, LLC. He has been teaching eBook production and marketing seminars to all levels of students in small and large groups for several years. Hen House Press publishes eBooks and paperbacks, primarily literary fiction with a focus on mystery and suspense. It also does eBook conversions of manuscripts for other publishers.

SOLD OUT!

One of the most writable and publishable forms for the personal essay is the 500 - 800 word commentary, seen in back-page magazine pieces, NPR commentaries, newspaper op-eds, and many online venues. A commentary is a short personal essay, combining anecdote, analysis, and opinion, and relates the writer's private experience to social trends and current events. The compactness of the form puts an emphasis on language, connecting the form to poetry, but it involves storytelling: characters, plots and settings developed in miniature. We will do several in-class writing exercises so each participant leaves the workshop with a few commentaries underway.

Best known for fifteen years of personal essays on All Things Considered, Marion Winik is the author of the New York Times Notable Book FIRST COMES LOVE, the Child magazine parenting book of the year THE LUNCHBOX CHRONICLES, the cult classic GLEN ROCK BOOK OF THE DEAD, and five other books of creative nonfiction and poetry. Winik's essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, O, Salon, Poets and Writers, and Real Simple, among many other places. She reviews books for Newsday and writes a twice-monthly column at BaltimoreFIshbowl.com. Currently teaching in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Winik has received an NEA fellowship in Creative Nonfiction and has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrect and Oprah.